Was Jesus a man of color? Why this question matters more than ever
Was Jesus a man of color? Why this question matters more than ever
The debate over the color of Jesus’ skin is one of the oldest running arguments in religion. But this Easter, the question is a serious one — for several reasons.
…
Who can forget when the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly declared in 2013 that Jesus, like Santa Claus, “was a White man, too,” and “that’s a verifiable fact,” a remark she later said was meant in jest.
...
First, while the classic Nordic Jesus remains a popular image today in some churches, a movement to replace the White Jesus has long taken root in America. In many Christian circles — progressive mainline churches, churches of color shaped by “liberation theology,” and among Biblical scholars — conspicuous displays of the White Jesus are considered outdated, and to some, offensive. In a rapidly diversifying multicultural America, more Christians want to see a Jesus that looks like them.
But in some parts of the country, the White Jesus never left. The spread of White Christian nationalism has flooded social media feeds with images of the traditional White Jesus, sometimes adorned with a red MAGA hat. Former President Trump is selling a “God Bless the USA Bible” with passages from the Constitution and Bill of Rights — a linking of patriotism with Christianity that reinforces a White image of Jesus that is central to Christian nationalism.
…
Blum says the image of a White Jesus has been used to justify slavery, lynching, laws against interracial marriage and hostility toward immigrants deemed not White enough. When Congress passed a law in the early 20th century to restrict immigration from Asia, Southern and Eastern Europe, White politicians evoked the White Jesus, he says.
“One of the arguments was, ‘Well, Jesus was White,’ ‘’ Blum says. “So the theme was, we want America to be profoundly Christian or at least Jesus based, so we should only allow White people in this country.”
The MAGA movement uses the image of a White Jesus to weaponize political battles, he says, pointing to signs at the January 6 insurrection displaying a White Jesus, sometimes wearing a red MAGA hat. To Blum, some Christian conservatives see a White MAGA Jesus as “an anti-woke symbol.”
Imaginary mythological creatures can look however you like.
Which is why Korean Jesus is best Jesus.
In what world would there be a blonde guy in the middle East, what a crazy ass conversation to keep having.
Unbelievable this question is even being asked and just goes to show how little thought people engage in when it comes to religion. If he existed at all of course he would look like any brown/dark skinned person living in the area thousands of years ago.
I could imagine the Romans bringing some blonde soldiers from Germanic tribes though.
White skinned, blonde, blue eyed phenotype occurs in Middle East for ages.
The idea that Jesus couldn’t be white because he was from Palestine is just an extension of a common US racist worldview that makes “muslim” a race and views Middle East as a valid non-white target. It’s nearly as stupid as the idea that Jesus’ skin color matters.
Holy shit you just brought to my attention that Jesus was in fact born in the Palestinian area. I knew that but it didnt click till now. That means Jewish people, who killed Jesus, are now trying to destroy and take over what wouldve been his homeland. How can any Christian who believes in Jesus side with Israel as they're trying to take over and kill everyone. Im not religious but fuck man thats twisted how the whole world got brainwashed to allow such a thing to happen.
"White people" didn't exist when Jesus was supposedly alive.
When someone's existence is based on "faith" (faith that trump is good, faith that the bible was indirectly written by god, faith that jesus was white) logic has no place in their worldview.
this was posted by the actual Jesus so I think this is it
I like the recent estimates of his appearance. This artist renders him even less good looking than probably most imagined when they think of someone from that region of the world, which makes me believe it's closer to appropriate.
Jesus wasn't a rock star. In Christianity and the new testament, God didn't portray himself in any way other than meager and a bit of a communist. That's the beauty of part of the story.
Edit, I think Jesus would have been easy to put on the no fly list, or walk by without a second thought, which is a challenge to our ways of thinking.
He was a dude from Jerusalem. Yeah, he was brown, and looked like… a dude. Because he was a normal-ass human being like everyone else.
I grew up heavily Pentecostal/Evangelical Christian - speaking in tongues, demons are real and possess people, God strikes down the wicked and regularly works miracles, etc. My whole childhood I was surrounded by hundreds of people who did not care about proof. They actually believe the universe is 6,000 years old, that God killed every person, plant, and animal on dry land in a Flood that covered even the highest mountain (~9km) and more nonsense.
So believing that Jesus was literally an impeccably groomed, attractive blue-eyed white man with a bodybuilder's physique in the Classical Era Middle East is well within the limits of these people's credulity. They believe things because they are told to do so from childhood, not because they've done their homework.
TL;DR: White Christians can often be ignorant racists who stubbornly cling to wrong ideas because they were told it makes them special.
There's a deacription of what he looked like in the Bible (and newsflash: he isn't white). But he would have to actually have existed for that to matter.
Jesus definitely existed. The real question is how similar his teachings were to the modern teachings of the churches.
Right, but he was actually called "Brian" and always denied being a holy man.
He didn't definitely exist and pointing to an outdated consensus does nothing to prove it.
Scholarship is evolving as religious institutions lose control of biblical academia and we're seeing the envelope get pushed further and further back. Go through a list of things the Bible says about Jesus and modern academics can demonstrate where they came from and that it's not history. Scholars accept that virtually every aspect of Jesus life and acts is made up so it's actually a tiny step to accept he was invented as a spiritual being just as the early writings seem to talk about him.
If Jesus was born as a blonde haired blue eyed viking spawn in what is now fookin Palestine, where the Sun is a deadly laser and the only whites are the occasional albinos, that would've been the miracle instead of Mary's "virgin birth".
Not really. Look closer at the tzaraat 'leprosy' where they are performing skin checks regularly looking for irregular and spreading marks:
https://www.thetorah.com/article/tzaraat-as-cancer
You can see there was a white ancestral minority population in ancient Judea given 2 Kings 5:27
Therefore the skin disease of Naaman shall cling to you and to your descendants forever.” So he left his presence diseased, as white as snow.
But when we look at accounts before the captivity, a different picture emerges given Lamentations 4:7
Her princes were purer than snow, whiter than milk; their bodies were more ruddy than coral, their form cut like sapphire.
In fact, in one of the Dead Sea scrolls (4Q534) it claimed Noah was a redhead.
What's probably going on is a revisionary rewriting of history shortly before the Bible as we know it is finalized. Josiah is allegedly introducing reforms opposing the traditions of Jeroboam (described as the son or grandson of a maternal leper), but the reforms appear anachronistic for Josiah given the communications between Elephantine and Jerusalem a century after his reign that don't reflect them.
We can even see that in between the time the LXX (Greek version) is written and the later Masoretic version that there's been rewriting of history around Jeroboam in 1 Kings 11-14 which has events attributed to him (sometimes doubled up) in the earlier version attributed to others in the later version. As Idan Dershowitz's book on the topic discussed, early Biblical edits may have been literally copy and pasted together, and one of the tells are duplicate stories.
Personally, I think there's something to Hecateus of Adbera's claim that the history of the Jews had recently been edited and changed under Persian and Macedonian rule.
In particular, we're now finding rather extensive evidence of sea peoples settlement and cohabitation around the early Israelites, with the Denyen as actually a great fit for the lost tribe of Dan, and there may well have been an endogamous matrilineal minority population in Judea that persisted throughout the ages.
And in general, you might be surprised at how ancient peoples might have looked in antiquity. Ramses II in his forensic report was described as having pale skin and red hair (not just dyed with henna but at the actual root), like the neighboring Libyan Berbers. Or the indigenous Ganache of an African isle.
We tend to mess up how we think people looked or underappreciate how diverse populations may have been because of anachronistic back projections.
He was literally middle eastern so yeah.
I seriously doubt that "Jesus" from the Christian bible actually existed. Most likely a man with the same name existed and eventually morphed into a folk hero of sorts. That being said, the individual whom the Jesus myth is based on was absolutely from the Middle East. Even Christians won't argue this. He had to have been some shade of "not white."
A man by his name existed. But remember we're talking about middle east, some 2000 years ago.
But wait a second, there is also this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Madonna Among christians, the cult of dark skinned Mary statues existed long before conservative american christians were a thing. I have seen a couple of these statue and you can see them immediately. Important, notable, detailed and often precious. They sit in their niche, silent.
Another suggestion is that dark-skinned representations of pre-Christian deities were re-envisioned as the Madonna and child.[3]
I think the whiteness is often associated with purity, but in many cases that isn't the whiteness of the skin colour (see the aformentioned examples). Even in the mediterranean are as a whole skin tones can be varied, often confusing the american representation of what is black and white.
Melville spends a chapter comparing the different interpretations of whiteness in Moby Dick. This article talks about that, but I recommend reading the chapter if you get a chance.
In Monterey CA, there are angel decorations that go up every year at Christmas. The designs were originally painted in the 50s and the artist made them brown skinned, inspired by Native American artists' depictions of angels.
How is this even a question? Of course he was.
Korean Jesus is the best Jesus.
I have never met a white Jesus, they have all been varying shades of brown.
He busy doing Korean shit
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Yeeeeeeeeees.Serious answer: It doesn't really matter - not only because religious organization is a cancer that should be removed from society, but also because at this point Christianity has splintered, evolved and reformed beyond idolatry of a guy from the desert.
When your existence is based on "faith" (faith that trump is good, faith that the bible was indirectly written by god, faith that jesus was white) logic has no place in worldview.
Jesus is dead. That’s all I know. Can we stop talking about him?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The painting looked like an ancient relic discovered in some long-forgotten desert monastery in the Holy Land, a Byzantine-styled fresco filled with sharply contoured figures, bursting with colors of deep blue and blood orange.
Who can forget when the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly declared in 2013 that Jesus, like Santa Claus, “was a White man, too,” and “that’s a verifiable fact,” a remark she later said was meant in jest.
His status rests on one remarkable painting, the “Head of Christ.” It’s been reproduced an estimated 500 million times in portraits that have adorned living rooms, Sunday schools, stamps and prayer cards.
It was released in mid-20th century America during an era of fervent patriotism, record church attendance and hysteria over the perceived threat posed by the Communist Party.
“By the time he offends abortion providers by saying God hates hands that shed innocent blood and rebukes Americans for our covetousness, he’d be called a bigoted coon and thoroughly canceled,” she wrote.
The writer Frederick Buechner once tried, memorably describing them as encountering “some new and terrible version” of Jesus, “disfigured by the mutilations of the Cross” while standing up and moving toward them with “unspeakable power.”
The original article contains 2,355 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 92%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Permanently Deleted
Jesus was, and still is, completely transparent. So no, not a person of color.
Something that does not exist does not have any colour.
Just look at any Jew living in the middle east.... Because he was a Jew from the middle east (if he existed). Probably looked a lot like this guy.
